Excerpt: God Put a Paintbrush to the Sky

I am young and here is my place of thinking. Tomorrow, or the next day, it may be different. How can one guarantee consistency in one's life? I already cannot remember the way in which I thought about the boy standing by the lake, framed against the dew of this morning. Is it possible to remember? Is it possible to keep memories real? Is it possible to maintain a rawness, an integrity, and wholeness to what we experience, to how we live, to what we live?

My name is Penelope Yerbuela Rodriguez, and I am small.

It strikes me that we live in a world in which who one is and what one does is no more than a freckle on the face of the motion of things. Because I walk this earth, this patch of earth, and because this patch of earth is a part of a larger patch of earth on which others walk, and because that patch of earth is part of something bigger than us... because I walk here and my footsteps are shallow, I am a fragment in the history of the world. I am from my home, but my home is from its home, and its home is from the earth, and the earth is from this galaxy, and the galaxy is from the universe. Can you understand how I feel small? How I feel like spread-away dust in the gravel? Can you understand how I feel, I know that I am no more than a whisper in the wind when trees converse with the bushes, when the animals play with the earth, when the world thinks to itself?

My name is Penelope Yerbuela Rodriguez, and just like the river knows no past and the oceans knows no future, I can only tell you the present.

Between yesterday and tomorrow, the water that sits here and sloshes up against the feet of Davey Jones will be different. But who can tell? To our eyes, it is all just water. And so to God, what do we look like?